Pronounciation: Spath-a-FILL-um co-chlee-air-a-SPATH-um

Hardiness zones
Sunset 13 (with ample protection), 20-24
USDA 9 (with ample protection), 10-11

Note: Used as an indoor container plant in all climatic zones

Landscape Use: Outdoors peace lily is tightly constrained to shaded and protected entryways and patios such as protected shaded planters underneath building overhangs where birds perch and crap, atriums, indoor malls, resturants, fancy resort entryways and common areas, indoor containers.

Form & Character: Basally clumping, upright, tropical, tender, clean, pure.

Growth Habit: Tender herbaceous perennial, basally clumping with leaves on extended petioles to 2-feet tall with lesser to equal spread.

Foliage/Texture: Leaves large, dark green, elongated and ovate with distinct veination, petioles extended to 18-inches long. Foliage often suffers from marginal necrosis due to even moderate soil salinity; medium coarse texture.

Flowers & Fruits: Brilliant white spathe flowers that turn a bland green prior to full senescence; fruits rounded and dark colored when mature.

Seasonal Color: Periodic and exciting display of singular flowers during most of year except winter.

Temperature: Peace lily has a cardinal temperature range for survival that makes it quite cold and heat intolerant in Phoenix. It will only survive outdoors with the thermal buffering effect and protection of buildings with a relatively high heat storage capacity.

Light: Shade, with ample indirect natural light.

Soil: Soil must be well drained and highly, heavily and richly amended with composted organic matter. Peace lily is fully intolerant of and easily damaged by soil alkalinity and salinity.

Watering: Regular irrigations in desert areas.

Pruning: None, except to remove spent foliage and flower stalks.

Propagation: Mostly by seed, some division of basal clumps.

Disease and Pests: Highly prone to root rot if soils as poorly drained or over watered.

Additional comments: In Phoenix, peace lily is a specialty plant for very specific landscape uses. Soil alkalinity and salinity sensitivites makes peace lily quite difficult to culture in all but the most heavily amended and shaded planter beds. In most of the Unites States, peace lily is used as an indoor container plant.

Special addendum: Popular (non-scientific) reports that peace lily and other tropical plants are able to remove indoor air pollutants grossly exaggerate and misrepresent the original 1989 NASA research study. Rather, peace lily has no ability itself to 'remove' air pollutants (sorry climate change fanatics, but CO₂ is not an air pollutant), but actually it was the container substrate that peace lily was grown in that provided a mild 'air-filtering effect' due to the substrate's microbial activity.